Should Plastic Be Banned? The Urgency Of A Ban!
A bad guy or an irreplaceable component in our lives? No matter how harmful it could be, plastic has become an indispensable evil of present societies.
The world is drowning in plastic. And our immense reliance on plastic is for a reason — it’s handy to use, cheap, extremely durable, and overall, it’s easy to produce and transport on a large scale.
Globally, the ever-increasing manufacturing of plastic has now become an alarming threat to our environment for both marine and land wildlife. So, the demand for immediate action is understandable to control the overproduction of plastic.
Meanwhile, accept that the extreme plastic dependence of the world can’t be rolled back in days. Do you think that banning plastic altogether will work that far? It could be — or not so.
Let’s take a look at the facts.
Why Should Plastic Be Banned?
Plastic products harm our ecosystem directly by piling up single-use plastic waste and indirectly by converting into microplastic and emitting greenhouse gases.
Statistically, the rate of annual plastic recycling is far lower than the massive demand for plastic — so, it all ends up filling the land.
Thereby, banning plastic or replacing it with any other environment-friendly alternative can help reduce plastic waste all over the world.
However, this idea also comes up with its own challenges including limiting scale, expensive raw materials, and poor durability — hence, our exclusive reliance on plastic is the ultimate outcome.
Plastic, Plastic Everywhere
Plastic manufacturing industries have grown more than any other commercial industry since the era when plastic was introduced in the market for the first time.
At present, the world is seemingly drowning in plastic where people might ingest tiny plastic specks from dozens to many thousands each day — it’s all posing a potential threat to life on the planet.
Plastic isn’t limited to disposable coffee cups, food packaging containers, water bottles, and candy wrappers rather it has been incorporated into all of our daily-used items such as clothes, cosmetics, cars, toys, and sanitary items.
Plastic is everywhere.
Plastics Do More Harm Than Good
Plastic products are so attractive to manufacture because of their excellent durability and the least degradability — and interestingly, this is what makes plastic harmful to use.
Plastic degradation took more than 400 years to potentially eliminate plastic from the environment altogether. It means that every single plastic product ever made is still around us waiting for its natural degradation.
Therefore, the fastest growing piles of plastic tend to flow into oceans, convert into microplastics, spread in the air, and enter the food chain. As a result, marine life begins to deplete, plants get toxified by plastic contamination, and humans become diseased globally.
Accounting all the potential threats to wildlife on the planet, we all agree that plastic should be banned. Right?
However, what you think of whether it would solve the problem or pose another challenge to us? Let’s find out.
Problem With Plastic Recycling
Where we produce tons of plastic waste each year globally, a little is subjected to recycling and further processing.
The problem with the recycling of plastic is its variable composition and degree of sustainability.
Different plastic products make use of varying polymers in distinct proportions and ultimately making it impossible to recycle a batch of different plastics together.
Not only this, the worth-recycling plastic also needed to be modified with the use of virgin plastic while other plastic types become even worse after a single round of recycling.
To make things even more complicated, recycled or modified plastic turns out to be of low economic value and tends to be more toxic for further use.
Banning Single-Use Plastic Is Essential!
Single-use plastic includes all the products that we use only once before tossing them such as straws, coffee cups, shopping bags, water bottles, and Styrofoam-based disposable utensils.
We use these single-use plastics for just a few minutes and left them to harm our environment for years — it’s an irreparable loss to our ecosystem.
And the fact is that we can reduce an annual plastic dump by more than 40% by just avoiding single-use plastic. It sounds amazing. In that way, single-use plastic waste should be banned. Otherwise, it would continue to harm our marine life, biosphere, life quality, and economy uncontrollably.
Environmental impact
Plastic waste is primarily managed by dumping it to empty land spaces, incinerating it in the open air, and adding it to water streams. Either way it is managed, plastic waste ultimately causes the onset of land, air, and water pollution.
Plastic bags and disposable utensils can choke waterways resulting in sewage and sanitary issues. Parallel landfilling and direct incineration of plastics readily increase the proportion of microplastics in the air which can cause toxicity when inhaled.
To sum up, plastic is not only harming marine life and our natural water resources, it has to affect our health status and lifestyle at the end of the day.
Health And Social Impact
Plastic products are exclusively made of petrochemical fractions resulting in depleting non-renewable resources. Moreover, mining, drilling, and extracting fossil raw materials contaminate the ground water that we drink.
Plastic manufacturing is a highly toxic process with great potential to cause lung cancer among workers of the industry and people nearby to such manufacturing plants.
The plastic waste issue is also associated with the term welfare losses, where developed countries export their unmanaged waste to developing countries with poor waste management systems.
Economic Impact
The transportation and recycling of plastic products are costly than their production and packaging. And the elimination of previously accumulated plastic also requires heavy funding that developing countries can’t afford.
Moreover, a rapid decrease in marine life also affects the fishing and shipping industries irreversibly — affecting the economy of developing countries badly.
Actually, Banning Plastic Is Not A Solution!
Plastic is not only used to make water bottles, packaging wrappers, disposable utensils, and shopping bags — it’s far more important in various other aspects of life.
For instance, the use of plastic in hospitals and medicines is inevitable. Disposable gloves, syringes, tubes, masks, and blood bags are all plastic-based. Moreover, surgery equipment also comprises various plastic products.
Out of the medical aspect, plastic is of considerable importance when comes to producing synthetic clothes.
Banning plastic would definitely change our habits about how we dress because global cotton production will become largely unable to meet our clothing requirements.
Synthetic shoes also outweigh the extensive use of leather in industries making durable and stylish shoes. Moreover, banning plastic bags will also impact frozen products and sealing methods ending up in economic loss.
Above all, the potential plastic alternative such as aluminum foil, glass, bamboo, and stainless steel also have their own challenges of implementation associated with their limited production scale, poor durability, and lower sustainability.
It means that the slogan “plastic should be banned” is not true rather it would be best to say that “plastic should be managed”.
This is because banning plastic will not solve our problems and will possibly increase the challenges related to environmental pollution and economic aspects.
There Should Be A Plastic Waste Management System
Although banning single-use plastic can significantly minimize our extreme reliance on plastic products, it cannot solve all the problems related to managing plastic waste.
Therefore, it all requires a cost-effective and environment-friendly management system to get rid of immense plastic waste and bring about long-term outcomes.
For instance, there should be an improved segregation system to separate out different waste materials including plastic, glass, metals, and paper.
A particular type of waste should be treated using cost-effective chemical methods to recycle the waste and bring out something better from useless dumped waste.
The plastic-based packaging materials should be made of natural polymers with a higher potential to be recycled safely ending up with little or no waste.
Understand that the idea of banning plastic-based products altogether will collapse many industrial and retailer sectors making the overall situation even worse.
Therefore, it should be better to identify the most problematic single-use plastic and then replace it with anything cheaper and reliable. Promoting eco-friendly and affordable plastic alternatives can also solve the problem to a great extent.
However, individually we can try to avoid single-use plastic and get habitual of carrying reusable water bottles, shopping bags, and other products of daily use. This habit will not only shift your lifestyle healthily but also encourage others to follow you contributing together to cope with environmental hazards.
What do you think about should plastic be banned?
Or, do you have a better idea to cope with the ever-increasing piles of plastic waste? If yes, let us know in the comment section.
